What prisons won’t tell in a day

Telangana’s prison department has re-launched its ‘Feel the Jail’ experiment at the Chanchalguda prison. For Rs 1,000 (12 hours) or Rs 2,000 (24 hours), visitors experience prison life: surrendering personal belongings, being locked in a cell, eating prison rations, sleeping on a hard surface with standard-issue bedding, and following prison discipline. The aim is awareness and deterrence, especially for young folk.

As short stays often are, the paying visitor will at best get a sanitised experience, safe in a cell by himself. Not so the government’s free guest. He will have to forgo the luxury of a cell and be thrown into crowded barracks. Nationwide, prisons are unhygienic and dangerously tight on accommodation. Overcrowding averages around 120% over the sanctioned space available. Twelve jails, including Delhi’s Tihar, belong to the 400% overcrowded club, with Uttar Pradesh’s Muradabad nearly at 500% capacity.

Sensibly, Telangana does not have overcrowding. But elsewhere, staff shortage and chronic overcrowding mean that the inmate gets locked into overcrowded barracks for up to 14 hours, sleeps on rough stone near a stinking toilet, spooned up against another unknown, until the pre-dawn wake-up call takes him into another long, aimless, and fretful day.

The best and most educational part of tourism is meeting the people. But our stay-and-pay visitor may not get this opportunity. Here, he would find forgotten people: those with mental health issues waiting in limbo to be declared fit to stand trial—a trial that will never come; a seventeen-year-old sister-in-law picked up with her whole family in a suspected dowry death matter; or one half of a dodgy love-jihad accusation, or a relationship gone wrong. Here, the visitor may find a woman from another state who doesn’t understand the local language but is awaiting indictment for smuggling drugs. She knows nothing of any of it: just that someone gave her money to take ‘something’ to a friend.

The pay-and-stay guest will go home the next morning. The government guest must stay until someone can help get him or her out. It is little appreciated that more than two-thirds of inmates are undertrials, not convicts, waiting while the investigation or trial grinds on. Over 11,000 have been trapped for more than five years in the never-land of pre-trial custody. They cannot afford a lawyer or post bail. The government has schemes to help, but processes for free legal aid are by no means instantaneous and private representation is often a ruinous indulgence without any guarantee of quality.

Organisers will have medical help on hand should the visitor suffer any physical or mental setback from the natural fear and anxiety isolation and incarceration bring, even when release is assured. Ordinary inmates cannot expect such help. Though Model Prison Rules require one doctor for every 300 inmates, the national average is about 775. In these tense, high-risk, often lethal spaces, illness and death are constant; suicide can be three times higher than outside, turning temporary loss of freedom into a death sentence.

Towards real reform

Prison conditions are appalling. Jails are the dumping grounds of a careless justice system. Saddled with ramshackle infrastructure, deficient funds, and unsuitable, insufficient staff, they cannot return rehabilitated atmanirbhar citizens into society, as the policy demands.

Imagination must go beyond building more jails faster: create a professional cadre of jail administrators, not parachuted-in police officers whose instincts lie elsewhere. Foolish provisions jailing people for trivial infractions and unjustified arrests that smack of unchecked power must go. Reform needs greater diligence from adjudicators and supervisors. Magistrates need regular instruction on probation, remand and bail – not only “bail not jail” sermons. The elephant in the room is a culture of lapses.

Telangana’s prison tourism experiment has met with mixed reviews. Any initiative that brings attention to prisons, their populations, conditions, and the administrative difficulties that compound them deserves a sympathetic hearing.

However, the visitor who has a thousand rupees to spare for a night of government-sponsored discomfort seems an unlikely candidate for a future stay. The experiment might be better served – and reform better accelerated – if the target audience were drawn from those with greater decision-making power, or even greater access to spare income. Those with a bent of mind for certain kinds of creative entrepreneurship, who might one day find themselves in a facility rather less sanitised than the one on offer in Telangana. They could yet prove the most persuasive vanguard for prison reform in this country.

(The writer is Chief Editor, India Justice Report)